Arena Digest: Why is the GOP scared of Ron and Rand Paul?

Around 1980, Lincoln Republicans (Northern establishment Protestants) worried about the influx of religious conservatives: conservative Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews from northern cities and the Southern Baptists and other evangelicals from the South and rural areas.

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In 1989, there was a new worry when Pat Robertson’s campaign activists joined the party structures after his 1988 primary campaign.

In 2008, the Ron Paul activists showed up and stayed in Republican Party politics. More worries.

And now the tea party activists who were not active two years ago but became active in reaction to the Obama/Reid/Pelosi explosion of federal spending are swelling the ranks of the conservative movement and promising/threatening to vote Republican.

I want more such problems in the future.

James J. Zogby, founder and president, Arab American Institute

Straw polls, in general, but especially at this point in time, aren’t worth straw. We know that and yet persist in giving them ink.

Take heart, Gary Johnson! Your day may yet come.

David Boaz, executive vice president, Cato Institute

Three weeks ago, at a Cato Institute conference, Grover Norquist asked three Republican congressmen how many of their colleagues now think the Iraq war was a mistake. The answer: “almost all of us.” That’s an issue the GOP establishment doesn’t want an open debate on.

And that’s why, even though Rand Paul would be the strongest voice in the Senate for spending restraint and constitutional government, Big Government conservatives in Washington are trying to keep him out of the Senate: Because they desperately fear that a conservative anti-interventionist leader on foreign policy just might reveal that a lot of Republicans and conservatives across the country don’t buy the world-policeman foreign policy the Bush-Cheney administration imposed on the GOP.

It is the people of Kentucky and across America who should be very scared of Rand Paul because of his dangerous views on critical national security and foreign policy matters.

Last month, former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed Kentucky’s Secretary of State Trey Grayson in the GOP Senate primary, saying that Grayson “is right on the issues that matter — both on fiscal responsibility and on national security.” Of Grayson’s opponent Rand Paul, Cheney expressed deep reservations about his views on national security, saying, “We need senators who truly understand this and who will work to strengthen our commitment to a strong national defense and to whom this is not just a political game.”

Indeed, Paul has taken a number of strange and troubling positions that are far outside the Republican mainstream on national security issues. On the defense budget, Paul says we should cut what “we are doing militarily.” On terror suspects held in the Guantanamo Bay detention center, Paul once said, “They should mostly be sent back to their country of origin or, to tell you the truth, I’d drop them back off into battle. ... You’re unclear, drop ’em off back into Afghanistan. It’d take them a while to get back over here.” (Although he now repudiates those comments after they were brought to light by Grayson.)